Friday, February 26, 2010

Dont Laugh! Climate Expert Says January Hottest On Record

CLIMATE scientists yesterday stunned Britons suffering the coldest winter for 30 years by claiming last month was the ­hottest January the world has ever seen.

The remarkable claim, based on global satellite data, follows Arctic temperatures that brought snow, ice and travel chaos to millions in the UK. At the height of the big freeze, the entire country was blanketed in snow. But Australian weather expert Professor Neville Nicholls, of Monash University in Melbourne, said yesterday: “January, according to satellite data, was the hottest January we’ve ever seen.

Is Joe Stack a Wake-Up Call to America?

"In my lifetime I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say." ~ Joe Stack

On Thursday, Feb. 18, 2010, 53-year-old, financially strapped software engineer Joseph Stack crashed a small plane into an IRS office building in Austin, Texas. He left behind a wife, a stepdaughter and a suicide note he had posted on his software company’s website. By the following day, the various media pundits on the right and left had already dismissed Stack as a fringe lunatic, and anyone who agreed with Stack’s diatribe against an unjust government was labeled a crackpot. However, while you can – and should – disagree with the method of Stack’s madness, Americans shouldn’t be too quick to discount the source of his frustrations.

Clearly, Stack is neither a hero nor a martyr. Nor is he technically a terrorist. Rather, he is the end product of a system that pays little heed to the disaffected, discontent and voiceless. And while Stack may have been alone in the cockpit of that Piper Cherokee plane, he is not alone in his discontent and frustration.

Stack is representative of a burgeoning class of disaffected Americans who are waking up to the reality that the American governmental system no longer works as it was intended – that is, it no longer works for them. In its place, a government of elites comprised of politicians and unelected bureaucrats has emerged that views the average American as little more than a source of tax funds and labor to keep the massive machinery of government operating. We have shifted from having a government that is "of the people, by the people, for the people" to one that is largely seen as predatory, a "government of wolves."

Unfortunately, most Americans are so caught up in their own hectic day-to-day lives that Joe Stack stands to become just one more passing media sensation without anyone giving any real thought as to why he chose to end his life as he did. Yet if we allow this incident to quickly fade into media oblivion, we will be doing a great disservice to all those like Stack who are suffering under the crushing weight of economic hardship, hopelessness and despair.

So what should we glean from this seeming exercise in futility?

Is it a populist lesson, as Stack states in his suicide note, "that there are two ‘interpretations’ for every law; one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us"? Is it a reality check that we "live in a country with an ideology that is based on a total and complete lie"? Is it a social commentary on the "incredible stupidity of the American public; that they buy, hook, line, and sinker, the crap about their ‘freedom’… and that they continue to do so with eyes closed in the face of overwhelming evidence and all that keeps happening in front of them"?

I would venture to say that it is all of these things and one thing more: an act of abject desperation from a man who had been pushed to the breaking point. "I know I’m hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand. It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country, and it isn’t limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants. I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be as many after," writes Stack. "But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at ‘big brother’ while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won’t continue; I have just had enough."

That said, Joe Stack is not "D-FENS," the white-collar worker in the 1993 film Falling Down who goes on a shooting rampage after being pushed to the edge by a myriad of frustrations. This guy didn’t work within the system to fight back – he’s no Tea Party patriot. Instead, he checked out – and that’s an important distinction – and is signaling to others that perhaps they, too, need to follow his lead.

The Joe Stacks of the world should be a wake-up call to Americans that it’s time to shake themselves out of their zombie-like stupor and realize that there is a growing segment of our nation that is at the end of their ropes. These are not bad people, nor are they extremists. Rather, they are average Americans who have lost faith in the government’s ability to meet their most fundamental needs.

The question is: what are we going to do about these disaffected, disconnected and discontent Americans? How do we reach out to them and persuade them that there is a better solution than the one-way exit proffered by Stack? Note, by "we," I’m not referring to the politicians or law enforcement officials or any other government official who might view this as a problem behavior to identify, stamp out and sweep under the rug.

It comes back to what I’ve said all along: if there is to be any hope of turning things around, it will have to start with "we the people" first recognizing that there is a problem and then working toward a solution together.

The problems are right in front of you. They’re in your local communities, in the neighbor who is out of work or the co-worker who may be in danger of losing her home. It’s in the growing number of children who live in poverty and go to bed every night hungry – now estimated at nearly 14 million children in America. It’s in the more than 39 million people who are subsisting on food stamps – 6 million of whom have no other source of income. That translates to roughly 1 in 4 children in America on food stamps, and 1 in 50 Americans now living in a household with a reported income that consists of nothing but a food stamp card.

These are issues that Stack addressed generally in his suicide note, only to be derided by some commentators for spouting socialist or populist propaganda. But that’s the problem with people who can’t distinguish between politics and basic human decency. They have lost sight of their humanity. Frankly, there is nothing wrong with suggesting that a nation as affluent as the United States should not abide by this kind of suffering.

It’s obvious that our politicians are not about to change. They are going to continue to promise a lot while doing very little, all the while spending our hard-earned tax dollars on lavish, jet-setting lifestyles. The problem with the Joe Stacks of the world is that they keep relying on government to fix the problems, but government officials are not going to fix them because most of them don’t really seem to give a damn.

So what’s the cure to the disaffected and alienated ones among us? It’s you and me. It’s our churches and synagogues and private institutions. In fact, if the churches in America would open soup kitchens and open their doors to the homeless, no one would have to go hungry or sleep out in the cold.

Thus, it’s each and every one of us – young and old, single and married, white collar and blue collar, liberal and conservative, religious believer and atheist alike – reaching out and chipping in and working in our communities to fix these problems from the ground up.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

We have been ranting for some time now on the socialist takeover of the US government. If you are a regular reader of our frequent rants you know that we are convinced that the US is already committed to a socialist form of government replacing what is left of the democratic representative republic our founding fathers gave us with their blood.
A while back, I wrote the following: “There has been a movement underway, in this country, which the Democratic Party adopted, way back in the fifties and sixties, to turn America into a socialist state like unto Europe. They have almost accomplished their goal.For all intents and purposes, America is no longer a democratic republic. America has already become a socialist state. Those of us old codgers who remember when we were prepared to go to war to fight the spread of socialism cringe when we see how our country, America, has deteriorated into the black hole of socialism. We cringe when we hear today’s politicians, national leaders, as it were, spouting Marxist slogans from the floor of the national legislature. The national nightmare has become the American dream. Now we wait to see socialism suffocate the human spirit in Americans as it has already begun to do.This was once, not very long ago, a land of unlimited possibilities…a land of new horizons everyday. No longer. We have chosen security over freedom. That’s all it took. Freedom is s fragile thing. One blow from the hammer of socialism and freedom shatters… and is no more.Those of us who remember the REAL America weep for our country.”
Someone once said: “A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.” I haven’t a clue as to who actually said it. Experience has taught us, however, that it IS true.
Socialism has failed, utterly, everywhere in the world it has been tried. The European nations have begun to awaken to this fact and are voting socialists out of public office. Here in America, we have just voted into office our first socialist President, if you don’t count FDR who actually iniated socialism into the American government.
Those of us in the American middle class are going to feel the brunt of Obama’s socialist policies. With a willing and compliant Congress of the same political party, and same political mind, he will get practically everything he seeks from them. Guess who will pay the bill? The middle class, that’s who.
We old veterans catch a lot of flack for our denouncement of socialism. Understand, this: My generation was trained to go to war against the socialist movement, if it became necessary. Today we are told we must stand down and accept it as the norm in America. If you think that is easy to do, then you totally misunderstand our commitment to democracy in America. You do not have inkling as to our commitment to the representative republic that was America.
Those of us who wore the military uniforms of America swore to uphold, to protect, and to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and/or domestic. Ask any of America’s military veterans and we will quickly tell you there was no expiration date on the oath we took.
One of our Founding Fathers, a fellow by the name of Thomas Jefferson said the following: “To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, ‘the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it.”
T. Coleman Andrews, a former US Commissioner of Internal Revenue, said the following back on May 25, 1956 in U.S. News & World Report: “I don’t like the income tax. Every time we talk about these taxes we get around to the idea of ‘from each according to his capacity and to each according to his needs’. That’s socialism. It’s written into the Communist Manifesto. Maybe we ought to see that every person who gets a tax return receives a copy of the Communist Manifesto with it so he can see what’s happening to him.”
And finally, a man I have admired all my life, Sir Winston Churchill, said this: “Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy.” I would ask you to consider Churchill’s phrase “the creed of ignorance.” It is my belief that ignorance is to blame for the United States government being in the hands of a socialist elite today and the underlying reason for the election of B.H. Obama to the Presidency of the US.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Global Warming Is Dying a Slow and Painful Death

2010 February 14

by Michael van der Galien

The theory of global warming continues to fall apart. The Daily Mail reports today that Professor Phil Jones, the academic at the center of ClimateGate, admits that there has been no global warming since 1995. That’s quite an admission, but it becomes even better: he now also says that the world may have been warmer during the dark ages.
The Times of Londonadds that the ‘United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.’ John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, now sincerely questions the data the IPCC relied to argue that ‘the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”.’ Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report said he agrees with Christy. To sum up today’s revelations:
The data used to create the infamous ‘hockey stick graph’ is missing
There has been no global warming since 1995
Warming periods have happened before and were obviously not due to man
It’s likely that the Earth was warmer in medieval times than now
Oh my, I can’t help but wonder what the Goracle has to say about all this. Where is He now His flock is losing its faith in His message?

Barack Hussein Obama’s (I am not an ideologue) agenda is crumbling, flailing, stalling. Perhaps the public didn’t get the memo from Obama and the administration that it’s not the agenda, it’s the approach and the message. The new end-around the public perhaps will be Obama executing executive orders over and around the American people’s will. Rahm Emmanuel this week was quoted as saying that the executive orders will “get the job done across a front of issues.”
Excuse me? Essentially, instead of listening to the will of the people, the next plan of attack to rescue a floundering agenda is to sneak in legislative goals and aims through the (un)checked and (un)balanced executive order process? I read earlier this morning as well in the New York Times that this approach may be used to herald in wildly unpopular (not the wording that the NYT used) initiatives, cap and trade, piece by piece; for instance.
As the executive order proclivity of George W. Bush was something that Obama railed against on the campaign trail, (along with transparency) we can find that this may be yet another grand scale betrayal of campaign promises and trust. Thus, when the American people become privy of this approach through alternative media, I can only imagine that the level of distrust, anger and resentment on Main Street will increase exponentially. Recall that recent polling shows that 3/4 of Americans are unhappy with our government.
Another grand scale betrayal from Obama and company – you can sign an executive order on that.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

"In my own life in my own small way, I have tried to give back to this country that has given me so much," she said. "See, that's why I left a job at a big law firm for a career in public service, "...

Michelle Obama

No, Michele Obama does not get paid to serve as the First Lady and she doesn't perform any official duties. But this hasn't deterred her from hiring an unprecedented number of staffers to cater to her every whim and to satisfy her every request in the midst of the Great Recession.
Just think, Mary Lincoln was taken to task for purchasing china for the White House during the Civil War. And Mamie Eisenhower had to shell out the salary for her personal secretary from her husband's salary.

Total Personal Staff members for other first ladies paid by taxpayers:

Mamie Eisenhower: One-- paid for personally out of President's salary.

Jackie Kennedy: One

Rosaline Carter: One

Barbara Bush: One

Hilary Clinton: Three

Laura Bush: One

Michele Obama: Twenty-two

How things have changed! If you're one of the tens of millions of Americans facing certain destitution, earning less than subsistence wages stocking the shelves at Wal-Mart or serving up McDonald cheeseburgers, prepare to scream and then come to realize that the benefit package for these servants of Ms. Michelle are the same as members of the national security and defense departments and the bill for these assorted lackeys is paid by YOU, John Q. Public.

Michele Obama's personal staff:

One... $172,200 - Sher, Susan (Chief Of Staff)

Two... $140,000 - Frye, Jocelyn C. (Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Policy And Projects For The First Lady)

Three... $113,000 - Rogers, Desiree G. (Special Assistant to the President and White House Social Secretary for Mrs. Obama)

Four... $102,000 - Johnston, Camille Y. (Special Assistant to the President and Director of Communications for the First Lady)

Five... $100,000 - Winter, Melissa (Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief Of Staff to the First Lady)

Six... $90,000 - Medina , David S. (Deputy Chief Of Staff to the First Lady)

Saturday, February 6, 2010

We're all somewhat familiar with the body language dogs display when they greet each other. The dominant alpha male approaches directly, asserting his authority, while the beta male genuflects, crouches, tucks his tail, and may even end up on his back, exposing his neck in acquiescence, making sure the alpha male knows he has no intention of challenging him. With his "we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist" opening to the world's dictators, the President is exhibiting classic beta male behavior, in essence rolling over on his back and exposing his throat to them to make sure they know he has no intention of challenging their authority.

Of course, the problem is that he's not simply exposing his throat, he's exposing America's collective throat, sending the message that he's a typical beta male intent on submitting to all the alpha male leaders around the world, and damn the consequences. His response to the discovery of Iran's newest, and heretofore "secret," nuclear facility was, as Daniel Henninger (Wall Street Journal, October 1, 2009) points out, to have our State Department offer to start a direct dialogue with the tyrannical Burmese regime.

The Obama administration has also offered conciliatory gestures to the genocidal Sudanese leader Omar Hassan al-Bashir, and it has dispatched none other than John Kerry to meet with Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. This, of course, is not to mention his somewhat more visible overtures to the world's alpha male thugs: Obama has consorted jovially with Hugo Chavez and his counterpart Daniel Ortega, he's bowed down to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, he's agreed to halt plans to install a missile defense system in eastern Europe to placate Vladimir Putin, and he's offered the aforementioned hand to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, despite the latter's expressed unwillingness to even agree to acknowledge the truly important issue of Iran's nuclear weapons in our talks, all quintessential beta male behaviors.

While we've all been seeking a political rationale for the president's actions, his behavior goes beyond the political to something deeper and more personal: like all beta males, Barack Obama simply does not have the temperament to confront tyrannical alpha males around the globe. In this light, even his inability to work with American allies Gordon Brown and Nikolas Sarkozy is a function of his being incapable of facing down the world's tyrants: to cooperate with our allies would require Obama to display alpha male behaviors, including demonstrating courage, something he's simply not capable of doing. The president's beta-male proclivities are arguably putting the safety of his constituents, the citizens of our country, in serious jeopardy.

Another cue to this unfortunate character trait of the president's can be found in the lack of assertiveness of his oratorical style. While many people insist that Barack Obama is a wonderful speaker, in fact, he exhibits less emotional range when he addresses a crowd than his predecessor, George W. Bush, did. He may have better speechwriters than W, but his delivery is monotonic and his cadences clipped, both signs of a beta male, unsure of himself, putting his words out there more for the purpose of seeking approval than of providing leadership.

The president's characteristic head tilt when he's speaking to an audience or having to deal with a tough question when he's being interviewed (although there are certainly very few instances of his having to do this) is another sign of submissive behavior. It crops up less than a minute in during an interview with Fox News's Bill O'Reilly (YouTube - Barack Obama Interview With Bill O'Reilly Sept 4, 2008 - FNC ) in answer to O'Reilly's question, "Do you believe we're in a war on terror?" After an initial "Absolutely," the Candidate begins to hedge, his head tilts as he explains the difficulty in sorting out the good guys from the bad guys in the Middle East. Like beta males everywhere, Obama is not about to commit to words that he might have to back up with assertive action.

Being a beta male is all about developing strategies for deflecting aggression, and for this reason, beta males do have an important place in society. Within the confines of a social unit, beta-male behavior can help to defuse aggression and maintain domestic peace. But in a world where other nations' alpha-male leaders are constantly probing for even the smallest signs of weakness, having a beta male president has thrown into stark relief the dangers to which this president's unfortunate character trait is exposing his country.

To return to the canine metaphor: It's the height of folly to think that other nations won't be doing everything they can to make President Obama their bitch.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Drowning in a sea of health care red inkByTroy MediaFriday, January 29, 2010
By Gwyn Morgan
Even before the recession, provincial spending was on an unsustainable trajectory. Now revenues have fallen precipitously. Last month, former central bank governor David Dodge warned governments to get their fiscal houses in order.
Even before the recession, provincial spending was on an unsustainable trajectory. Now revenues have fallen precipitously. Last month, former central bank governor David Dodge warned governments to get their fiscal houses in order.
“Budget season is coming up,” he told The Globe and Mail in an interview. “If we don’t see a plan laid out . . . there is a risk that markets will begin to lose confidence in what’s going on.” Ontario in particular, he said, will have to experience serious fiscal retrenchment.
Current trends would see Ontario’s total debt balloon to more than $230 billion by 2011. Last fall, the province’s credit rating was downgraded in response to a projected annual deficit of almost $25-billion. Credit downgrades increase the cost of borrowing, making the deficit grow even faster. And provincial planners had better not count on growth in tax revenue. Ontario’s industrial base is going through a challenging restructuring and renewal process that will continue for years to come.

Program costs rising

Meanwhile, program costs keep rising. This year Ontario is expected to be the first province requiring half of its total revenues just to pay for health care. Education costs continue to rise as well, but apparently not fast enough for the McGuinty government. The province recently announced a fully paid, all-day kindergarten program for four- and five-year-olds that will cost some $1.5- billion per year when fully implemented. Let’s hope earlier childhood education helps these youngsters shoulder their future share of Ontario’s public debt, which will be around $20,000 per capita by the time they start grade one.
Ontario’s surreal state of denial on the true scope of its fiscal challenges can’t continue much longer. Just as individuals lose control of their personal finances when debts spiral out of control, so it is with public debt. And in both cases the workout is long and painful.
Ontario is our biggest province and it’s in the biggest trouble. But it’s not alone. Alberta is running a $6.9-billion deficit, Quebec $4.7-billion, B.C. $2.8-billion, Saskatchewan $1.1-billion, New Brunswick $800-million, Manitoba $600-million, Nova Scotia $600-million, Newfoundland and Labrador $400-million, and Prince Edward Island almost $100-million.
The provinces can’t count on being bailed out by rising revenues because the economic recovery is expected to be long and ragged. And raising tax rates would be counterproductive and politically toxic. The only realistic option is to put the brakes on spending. But how?
The obvious place to start is health care, every province’s biggest and fastest rising expense. Our aging population and the higher cost of new technology made health care unsustainable well before the recession battered provincial revenues. There are three basic options for reining in costs: rationing of services, changing delivery models, and implementing user fees.
Without moving beyond our bureaucratic, monopolistic, rigidly unionized delivery system, the only option is more severe service rationing. As I witnessed in the state-run department stores of the former Soviet Union, rationing always leads to longer lineups and even worse shortages.
Independent studies rank Canada’s health care system well behind that of other developed countries. The Euro-Canada Health Consumer Index, a joint project of European-based Health Consumer Powerhouse and Canada’s conservative Frontier Centre For Public Policy, ranks the performance of our health care system as 23rd out of 30 when compared with European countries.
In the top 11 are the Netherlands, Austria, Luxemburg, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, France, Finland, Norway and Belgium. Little Estonia’s 12th-place ranking is 11 places ahead of Canada, which ranked just behind Slovakia and ahead of Malta. The peer-reviewed study (available online) is professional and thorough, with overall rankings developed from examination of five major categories further divided into 32 subcategories.
The good news for Canadians is that once access is gained to our health care system, outcomes compared well. The bad news is that long waiting times put Canada in last place in terms of accessibility and “bang for the buck.” It’s outrageous that, with the fourth- highest per capita spending, our overall performance ranked 23rd out of 30. Increasingly inaccessible and delivering the worst value for money, the undeniable conclusion is that our health care system urgently needs major surgery.

Health care afflications

But why is it suffering from these afflictions? A 2008 study from the Fraser Institute entitled How Good is Canadian Health Care? provided a diagnosis and a prescription. As the report’s co-author Nadeem Esmail said on its release: “Canada is the only OECD country that outlaws privately funded health care service. Every top performing OECD nation has some form of user-pay, private provision health care. The evidence clearly shows that these systems are delivering better health care for their citizens.
Nearly 85 per cent of OECD countries also charge user fees for access to health care services such as doctor visits and hospital care. More than half of OECD countries also permit private providers to deliver publicly funded care.” So if your business is in the process of going bankrupt and your biggest division has the highest cost structure and the poorest service, you restructure or die. Will Ontario lead its provincial peers in fundamental health-care change, or simply slowly drown in a sea of red ink?Gwyn Morgan is the retired founding CEO of EnCana Corp.

Monday, February 1, 2010

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says the nation will deliver a harsh blow to the "global arrogance" on this year's anniversary of the Islamic Revolution.

"The Islamic Revolution opened a window to liberty for the human race, which was trapped in the dead ends of materialism," Ahmadinejad said during a cabinet meeting on Sunday.

"If the Islamic Revolution had not occurred, liberalism and Marxism would have crushed all human dignity in their power-seeking and money-grubbing claws. Nothing would have remained of human and spiritual principles," he added.

Ahmadinejad said that in the three decades of its history, the Islamic Revolution had inspired some great developments in the world.

The Iranian president made the remarks as the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution approaches.

Iranians are expected to pour into the streets on February 11 to celebrate the occasion in public rallies across the country, as they have done annually over the past three decades.